Thursday, March 12, 2015

For my project relating to Heidegger I chose to make a music box out of found materials. My original thought was to get a bicycle and use that as the turning mechanism; however, once I started working on that I found there was no way to implement that practically. After digging around for materials I had my first version of the project made. It consisted of a sound board made of wood from one of my little brothers old projects, a crank made of pvc pipe from one of my last art projects, and a sheet of metal found at my inlaws house. The pvc pipe crank also had door stops that were left over from a home renovation project we did a few years ago.

When presented in class there were quite a few flaws that showed through. The original project was unstable, the crank mechanism would come off, and the metal just made noise. So, in the revision process I decided to see what I could fix about those. In version two of this project I used a lot of the same materials but changed the design. The wood still came from my brothers project and we used the same pvc pipe and part of the crank off the first one. The things that changed however, were the design and the noise. We found two small pieces of thing scrap metal at my inlaws house which we nailed to the bottom, giving the new piece a percussive sound. Then, we found an old toy bell kit from when our nieces were young, and took the keys off that. We suspended them using fishing line we had around the house. The crank was put in a new fashion so that it is stuck in the middle and cannot be taken out. The bass also has been stabilized a bit more so that it does not move as much when played.

In response to Heidegger, my piece is a response to his statement on the use of materials. He talked a lot about how with the silver chalice, the silver was chosen as a material, and once it was made the chalice would have its purpose. In my piece, I took things that already had a purpose and repurposed them into something new. All of my pieces were things that had originally been used for something else, or had their own functions and I rebuilt them into a new chalice with new purposes.